HAIM says:"The whole story of how this video came about is kind of a crazy story. My mom was studying to be a teacher and to get your credential as a teacher you have to shadow another teacher and get your hours in. My mom gets a gig teaching credential gig at a school in the Valley. First twist: My mom is shadowing the teacher at the school. First week, the teacher has a heart attack in the in the parking lot of the school and my mom becomes the sole art teacher at this school. In one week. My mom was younger than me, like 22/23, and she now has 5 or 6 classes of kids that she now is the teacher for. She would always talk about this one kid named Paul. That she loved this kid Paul, he was very energetic, artistic, vivacious. We'd turn the TV on and Boogie Nights would come on or Magnolia and our mom was like, 'oh that’s Paul’s movie.' That being Paul Thomas Anderson. We were like, Mom are you talking about Paul Thomas Anderson? And she was like, 'Yes that is Paul, I taught Paul.' And so we were like, 'Okay mom.'

So now we're flashing forward to 2015, and we get a call from the most amazing person Asa at Electric Guest and he was like, 'So, um something crazy happened last night. I was at a party and I ran into Paul Thomas Anderson. And we were rapping about music and what we were listening to and Paul was like, 'I'm really digging this band, they're 3 sisters, they're from the Valley, they're repping the 818,' and Asa was like, 'Haim?' and he was like "Yes, Haim!' And Asa was like, I've known them since I was 15. And Paul was like 'Will you give them my email?' And Asa called us and was like Paul Thomas Anderson wants you to have his email. And we were like 'Ohmygosh, are you sure we're the right band? When he said Haim was he meaning Corey Haim or was he meaning someone else like 3 sisters from somewhere else? I dont know.' And Asa was like, 'No, he means you.'

So we got his email. We emailed him instantly. The email was like 'Yo, can we like hang out in the valley sometime? Henry's tacos... Dupars, every Valley-ism that I could pull out of my ass. [We looked at the email like a day before we hit send.] So he emailed us back and was like 'Let's get dinner.' And we're like [freaking out] 'Okay!' This was the tail end of Days Are Gone. And we both were uberfans of each other and we were like 'Okay, we're gonna go to Paul's house. We're gonna have dinner. Let's not mention mom because what if he didn't like mom? What if mom was an awful teacher? So we go to his house and we're so nervous that in the first three seconds, we're like 'Hey! Word vomit! My mom taught you back in the day!' And he was like 'What?' And we were like 'My mom was an art teacher" and he was like, 'Mrs. Rose?' He said Mrs. Rose! And we were like 'Yes that's our mom!' And he's like 'Hold on a second.' So he leaves, comes back with a painting of the mountain from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and he was like 'I painted this with your mom, I've kept it all this time, all these years, and I keep it in my son's room.' And we were like 'Ohmigosh' so that was the first connection.

At that point we were at the very tail end of Days Are Gone. And we were like trying to get things together, we didn't know what we could do. So we were just like 'You know what? Let's table this, let's just be homies.' So now flash forward to now. A couple months ago we were putting together our record, we had this chunk of songs, and we were thinking 'who do we trust and respect?' we want to show this music to someone. And Paul just kinda popped in our heads, so we emailed him and were like 'Hey we have this chunk of songs, we wanna show you them, we wanna get your opinion' and he instantly emailed back like 'Date and time? Place? Tell me.' And so he came to the studio the next day and we showed him the songs, and we were listening to it and he was like 'Why don't we just shoot this? You guys are in the studio, let's just shoot this.' And we were like '[whispers]... Genius Paul.'

So a couple of weeks later he came to the studio with his amazing crew and just like a fly on the wall just filmed us, everything on film, everything live to tape, and the best thing about it is when we shot this thing, the song kind of evolved from there. Where we were with the song to that point, it kinda evolved from that point, that was kinda like our starting point. So that was a very special moment for him to shoot because everything changed. We were initially tracking it. And I think what happened was we loved how it sounded, so we kinda just added from there. The recorded version that will come out with the album really is not that different so you really see the making of our record, and that was kinda why we wanted to start with this piece.

I think it's really hard to get what's in your mind onto tape. And it's really interesting to see Paul's process, the way he shot it. I mean we were just in the room, you could hear a lot of the room actually, which I really like about the recording, you can really hear the room. The room mics were really loud and you can hear our stomping around. And Paul really was like 'I wanna hear Alana click on her pedal' and you can hear that click when she does it, and you can hear our heels and we were like wow, this is crazy, I can't believe we pulled this off in a day. We had a day, one day. Paul had one day before he was going to go and film a movie. He was like 'I literally have one day, I have 10 hours.'"

Haim hints that they recorded more than just this one song so we'll probably be seeing some more of these studio vids over the next few months.

Last year, Haim got word that another iconic California artist wanted to meet them. "Our friend was at this party, and Paul Thomas Anderson was there too, talking about how he really liked 'these girls who play rock music and come from the Valley,'" Alana says. The director asked the friend to pass Haim his e-mail. Soon, they found themselves over for dinner with Anderson and his wife, Maya Rudolph ("One of the funniest people on the planet," says Este). Anderson said he wanted to shoot something with them. "It was like, 'Uh, you could shoot us on an iPhone for an hour if you want,'" Alana says.

Last November, Anderson dropped in as Haim laid down preliminary tracks at a Valley recording studio called Valentine. The studio had mostly ceased operations in the Seventies and was frozen in time, from the equipment down to the "vintage porn magazines lying around," Alana recalls. As Haim worked out arrangements on the fly, Anderson circled with a film camera. "In the room, it looked like nothing," says Rechtshaid, "and we were like, 'Uh, is this working out?'" "He was like, 'Yeah, got it, perfect,'" Alana says. "And when we saw the dailies, we were like, 'Eureka!'" Haim decided to use clips from this impromptu session – Danielle behind a drum kit, banging out a monster beat; the trio feeling their way through a rough version of a pining song called "Right Now" – to promote Something to Tell You.

It turned out they had another connection to Anderson: He also grew up in the Valley, and their mother, Donna, was his elementary-school art teacher. "She told us he was a really talented kid," Alana says, "but really hyperactive, and that she tied him to his chair with yarn once, to get him to sit still." She cracks up. "This was back in the day – not legal now!"

When they told Anderson, "He showed us this painting of the mountain from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He was like, 'I love your mom – I painted this with her.'" "We have that Valley kinship with him," Danielle says. Este nods: "The connection is deep."

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Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.